In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush took the “fateful decision” to allow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, said The Times. This meant, essentially, authorising forms of torture that didn’t cause death or organ failure: waterboarding (simulated drowning), beatings, confinement in coffin-sized boxes, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and the humiliation of suspects. Today, the consensus in Washington, and across the free world, is that the Bush administration’s turn to what vice-president Dick Cheney called the “dark side” was “morally unacceptable, strategically self-defeating” and “of limited, if any, use”. So it is “troubling” that Donald Trump declared in his first TV interview as president that he believes torture “absolutely”
works. He said that he would defer to his defence secretary, James Mattis, and the director of the CIA (both of whom oppose it); but that if his staff sought to use torture, he would “work for that end”.
Trump is clearly not swayed by the moral arguments, said Joshua Stewart in The Daily Telegraph. So it is important that we emphasise “the business side of the issue – which is that torture simply doesn’t work”. It has consistently failed to produce decent intelligence, as the Senate’s five-year inquiry into CIA methods confirmed. Tortured suspects tend to release “torrents of useless and made-up information in an attempt to appease their captors”. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, who was waterboarded 183 times, admitted: “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy
what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.” Abu Zubaydah, another al-Qa’eda operative,
was “broken” under torture, and invented a “kaleidoscope” of plots and fabricated names. One intelligence official said: “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”
“Torture isn’t merely ineffective,” said Zack Beauchamp on Vox. “It’s also vicious and deeply corrosive.” Another Senate committee found that legal authorisation for CIA torture led directly to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The CIA continues to insist that enhanced interrogation has been helpful in some cases, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. But even if you accept that – and the Senate inquiry rejected it outright – torture has “immense costs” that clearly “outweigh any tactical gain”. America’s image suffered “massive” damage as a result of George W. Bush’s decision. Trump may believe that “torture works”. “It is unlikely he has the slightest idea of how expensive that thinking may prove to be.”
